As the 2024 Autumn Equinox approaches next week, I am trying to reflect on why I haven’t made a post for what has essentially been all summer this year. It isn’t unusual that summertime is generally my least “productive” time for photography. I found a post I had in draft since early June, but I largely forgot about it. But it’s not like I have been away from my website. I just haven’t written anything about it here.

The onslaught of AI-scraping bots is a growing and continuous threat. It is much larger than the major players you read about in the news. Every technology/information/marketing company worldwide likely has its hands in creating AI-powered systems and LLMs. So, they develop bots that train on any website they can access.

Multiple bots visiting your site can slow it down, take up server resources you are paying for, and steal your text, ideas, and creative content, which you put a lot of effort into. Court cases and Copyright law have yet to come to any conclusions on how to enforce or address much of this. The technology is moving so much faster than the courts, government, or individual creators can keep up with.

It’s bad enough to defend yourself against humans who feel entitled to pass around your photographic work freely. Trying to fight large automated systems operating 24/7 by even larger companies can seem even more futile. It’s all a considerable motivation buzzkill. On top of that, various behind-the-scenes website issues I’ve been debugging contribute to a fair amount of technostress. Plus, I’ve found a lot of enjoyment in just doing work around the house and yard that has nothing to do with computers!

Be Like Water

In my 20s, I taught martial arts every week, something I became involved in as far back as high school. As someone might rightly assume, the late Bruce Lee was a bit of an idol. The Tao of Jeet Kun Do had a prominent place on my bookshelf. But perhaps lesser known than his physical skills as a martial artist was how he incorporated many aspects of ancient Taoism into his life philosophy. And even though my training has long since withered, I try to hang on to some philosophical aspects.

One of his most famous quotes was during an interview that inspired my water abstracts gallery;

“Empty your mind.  Be formless, shapeless, like water.   You put water into a cup; it becomes the cup.  You put it into a teapot; it becomes the teapot.   You put water into a bottle; it becomes the bottle.   Now water can flow, or it can crash!   Be water, my friend. ”  ~ Bruce Lee, 1971

You don’t need to know anything about martial arts to understand how such a philosophy can be applied to many different challenges in life. And what can be more fundamental to life than studying water? Choosing paths isn’t singular, as one can decide to be a teapot, try to erode the rocky cliff by crashing against it, flow with the current, or become an iceberg. Lately, it feels more like the rocky cliff option – which is a bit exhausting! But as water does, you try different paths and eventually find a way forward.

As the saying goes, water always wins, right? However, I don’t feel like I am consistently winning. This grasshopper needs more study.

A Summer of Rain

We’ve had some unnerving, torrential downpours over the summer here in Southeast Michigan. During one, I remarked that “raining cats and dogs” should be rebranded as raining sabertooth tigers and dire wolves. 🙂 Just think—climate change is just doing its initial warm-up stretches with this stuff.

I live in an area surrounded by floodplain forest, so seeing flooding isn’t unusual. But it typically doesn’t happen twice within a week and then recur over several weeks. Local infrastructure is being tested beyond what it was designed to handle. The stress testing reveals many areas of poor maintenance and inspection, resulting from kicking cans down the road to avoid asking taxpayers for rate increases. Floodplain maps, building codes, and zoning are all outdated for the new future we’ve created, and slowly, there will be a reckoning (and expense!) in trying to cope with this.

But, the rain did wonders for some new raised garden beds we started this year, and many plants in our yard loved it. One of our dogs liked rainwater in his water bowl above any other source – which we now label as skywater! (trademark pending) It’s a bit catchier and poetic than “rain.”

In August, I took my drone to a green infrastructure project to observe how it reacted to the rain. Before this construction, storm drains would empty into an underground tunnel, which flowed into the main river of our watershed. That means lawn fertilizers or other pollutants would eventually flow into Lake St. Clair, where algae is an increasing problem.

Now, some flow is diverted over the top of the tunnel, where plants and trees absorb and filter some of that runoff. Exploring here was a way to take my mind off other area happenings that are not so green; placing developments in floodplains is likely to become increasingly risky. I suppose it will take insurance companies to make officials listen there.

It is predicted to be relatively dry and warm as we coast into autumn. Crazy. My river of attention has been split into many different creeks over the last few months. I guess what little discipline I had to post blog updates suffered and dried up. I need to find that water path forward to rehydrate this space. 🙂

A Moment of Zen